The good news is that Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 is almost here. That's also the bad news. I'd really expected to see the shipping version of RHEL 7, the best-selling enterprise Linux distribution of all, at the company's annual Red Hat Summit meeting this week in San Francisco. Alas, it was not to be.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is almost here.

In all fairness when Red Hat announced the RHEL 7 beta n December 2013, the company described it as the most ambitious release to date and a platform that represents the future of IT. More than just the next generation of enterprise Linux server RHEL 7 is designed to provide the underpinning for future application architectures while supporting deployments across bare metal systems, virtual machines (VM), and cloud infrastructure.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 RC is available immediately to the company's strategic partners, including OEM and ISV partners, to help them certify their applications and systems. During the week of April 21, 2014, the company will also make RHEL 7 RC available to anyone to try. A download link has yet to be provided.

As for RHEL 7's real, final release, well I missed my first guess. At this point, I'll just say I expect we'll see it some time in 2014's 3rd quarter.